Same Pieces, New Pattern
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In my last blog — and periodically over the years — I’ve focused on the kaleidoscope and how it is a useful metaphor for the way we live today. If you haven’t looked through one lately, here’s a reminder of how they work: loose beads, pebbles, and bits of colored glass tumble around in a chamber at one end of the tube, while three mirrors running the length of the inside reflect them into endlessly shifting, symmetrical patterns. When you turn it, nothing is added or removed. The pieces simply catch the light from a new angle.
No one lives through just one lens, straight ahead, always in focus. Instead, we’re like those loose, colorful pieces inside. The kind that tumble and settle into a new pattern, a new angle, a new meaning. We remain who we are — but we are exploring new and different parts of ourselves all of the time, relearning and discovering anew throughout our lives.
I’ve written before about seeing more clearly — about removing the embellishments and finding that clarity, not fuzziness, is what remains. But clarity is only part of it. Sometimes the world itself turns. And what comes into focus shifts whether we’re ready or not.
And the world has done a lot of turning lately.
Over the past decade, the kaleidoscope has been spinning faster than most of us expected. The 2016 election shifted the political ground significantly. COVID isolated us and then clarified what we couldn’t live without. The resurgence of war — close to home for so many in the Jewish community — made abstract threats suddenly, painfully concrete.
Through each turn, the pieces inside haven’t changed. But what we see — what comes into focus — has.
Donors who always cared quietly about hunger now find themselves urgently funding school lunch programs, because “food insecurity” stopped being a statistic and became the kid in the next classroom. People who vaguely worried about Jewish safety are now writing checks for “guns and gates” — security infrastructure they never imagined their synagogues and other communal buildings would need. Women who assumed comprehensive healthcare was simply there are now recognizing what it meant to have taken it for granted, and stepping up to protect what they once thought was settled. And those who have always felt a quiet pride in their family’s immigration story are now leaning in — speaking out, funding resettlement, legal services, welcome — because the story feels personal again.
None of this is new caring. The pieces were always there — a quiet worry, a family story carried forward, an assumption so embedded it felt like air. What changed is not the person. What changed was the angle. The world turned, and something that had always been present suddenly caught the light differently. Not awakened — clarified. Not discovered — recognized.
The same is true of our philanthropy. We care about the things we see, constantly blended and reordered in new ways. The pieces — our values, our histories, our commitments — remain. The world turns, and suddenly we see them differently.
So I’ll ask you what I always ask: what are you seeing right now? What has come into focus that wasn’t there before — and what are you doing about it?
Let me know if I can help you see more clearly.
Fondly, and with my best wishes for a Shabbat Shalom,
Kari
